How are people really using crowdsourcing services?

Our mission involves recruiting large populations of internet users for research tasks, so we’re always interested in innovative crowdsourcing methods.  Crowdsourcing services allow many people to contribute to a project and be compensated in various ways.  We stumbled on 10 ways small businesses can harness big crowds by Ross Kimbarovsky, co-founder of CrowdSPRING, a sometimes controversial marketplace for design services.

The most interesting services highlighted are software testing (uTest), customer support (the always fantastic Get Satisfaction), domain-specific scientific, materials and technology research (InnoCentive), and prediction marketplaces (Inkling). The most successful crowdsourcing projects seem to be those that offer a win for both the business and the community members.  As a company developing tools to help both researchers and participants, this makes intuitive sense to us, and we’re happy to see this strategy succeeding elsewhere.